The left’s challenge: facing institutional and individual racism
by: Joel Wendland
August 12 2015

This is going to sound harsh but for me there is noteworthy parallel (note, I say parallel rather than equivalence) between the phenomenon of Donald Trump's garbage and the support by his followers in the past few days and the reaction of the Bernie Sanders campaign and its supporters to a couple of protests at rallies held to give Sanders a platform for his campaign.

We can learn about the dominant ideological positioning of the Trump campaign, the Republicans generally, and the extremism of the bulk of their vocal primary supporters by the apparent response of many GOP voters to the Megyn Kelly/GOP-FOX debate kerfuffle. The tenor of the backlash to Kelly's strong questions about Trump's sexism (notably not lodged against the nine other sexists on the platform) and other of Trump's critics reveal how obviously, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-working-class sentiments are at a fever pitch over on the right.

With this in mind, what does the response of Sanders' supporters and his campaign to the events in Seattle this past weekend suggest about what is happening over here on the left? Focused and emotionally intense criticisms that range from denunciations of the protesters' "tactics" to denunciations of one of them as a Palin supporter or as Hillary Clinton plants or whatever is to me revealing of how some of us on the left handle public discomfort addressing racism-our own and the power structure's. Defenses of Sanders' record in the 1960s and making the point that he hired an African American woman in his social media campaign ring hollow, with good reason, for too many people. (They seem to parallel Trump's own claim that he can't be sexist because he likes women CEOs or whatever garbage fell from his bloated yap.)

Here: http://peoplesworld.org/the-left-s-challenge-facing-institutional-and-individual-racism/